Welcome to the 2006 Fall Retreat:
Finding Common Ground

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

We are pleased to invite you to EGA’s 18th annual Fall Retreat. This year we are returning to the Asilomar Conference Center. Set along the shoreline of California’s Monterey Peninsula, Asilomar is a tranquil oceanfront retreat cradled by forests and white sand beaches and provides an ideal setting for learning, discussion, and building community.

As this year’s Program Committee (PC) gathered to develop the Fall Retreat and the theme that we hoped to explore throughout the keynotes, plenaries, and sessions, we thought about the fact that these are challenging and turbulent times. As we come together as environmental grantmakers, we must acknowledge that our climate is changing, in more ways than one. If we hope to be effective, we must build bridges, strengthen alliances, and collaborate in new ways to seize opportunities and respond to threats strategically.

We are seeing leadership emerge from a variety of fronts, hearing from voices that have previously been marginalized or silent or, in some instances, advocating against us. Like the biological diversity we know is essential to the sustainability of our planet, it is from the diversity of voices that the most innovative solutions to these problems emerge.

Finding common ground may be the only way we can solve the biggest problems of our time, such as global warming, species extinction, poverty, and health. We must strengthen the relationships we already have even while we reach out to new allies. We must work more closely with our friends in the business, faith, and labor communities, to name a few. Their voices are expanding the definition of environmentalism.

We welcome you to join us as we explore ways to broaden the movement, increase collaboration, and focus on solutions so that we can ultimately celebrate success.

A brief note on programming: While the PC carefully crafted each plenary and keynote session, we decided not to create individual breakout sessions. Instead we turned to EGA’s membership for ideas. After all, this is your retreat. We wanted you all to have the opportunity to showcase the issues, organizations, and programs in which you invest, to share what you’ve learned, and to engage other members of the EGA community in dialogue about our work. The PC selected 24 sessions from a pool of 74 proposals, striving to create a thought-provoking mix of member-sponsored sessions that reflect the diversity of opinions, cultures, interests, and backgrounds of members of our EGA community. We hope that you enjoy, learn from, and are challenged by the sessions that your peers have created.

Lastly, we would like to thank this year’s Program Committee for their hard work and dedication, the EGA staff for being amazing, and, of course, the Host Committee for doing such a fabulous job incorporating a sense of place into the retreat program.

Paul Beaudet, The Wilburforce Foundation
Anisa Kamadoli Costa, Tiffany & Co. Foundation
2006 Program Committee Co-Chairs